Page 4
December 5, 2018
Shared Stewardship
c ontinued from f ront
reallocation of resources from
things like prisons and police to
services for things that can ful-
fill the basic needs of community
members, like affordable housing,
health care, mental health care,
and education.
Mohamed Shehk, visiting com-
munications director for the na-
tional Critical Resistance organi-
zation in Oakland, Calif., told the
Portland Observer that advocates
for the group see most of the ex-
isting polices around policing and
law enforcement, for example, as
ineffective tools against crime that
fail to solve bigger problems.
“The Prison Industrial Com-
plex is a term that we use to de-
scribe the inner-locking systems
of policing, imprisonment, sur-
veillance, and the intersection of
interests between government and
industry that use those systems as
solutions to problems that are ac-
tually political, social, economic
in nature,” Shehk said.
United States’ disproportion-
ate housing of the world’s prison
population, and in particular of
communities of color within the
U.S., has been a contentious po-
litical issue. Civil rights leaders
in Portland and nationally have
photo credit d anny p eterson /t he p ortland o bserver
Social justice and communities of color advocates Cory Lira (from left), Myell Thompson, Anna
Swanson and Mohamed Shehk promote the opening of the Dismantle, Change, Build Center, a new
community gathering space in the former In Other Words feminist bookstore located at the corner of
Northeast Killingsworth and Williams Avenue.
called for changing laws for bet-
ter fairness, drawing support from
liberals like Vermont Senator Ber-
nie Sanders to former President
Barack Obama, who commuted or
pardoned 1,927 people for federal
crimes, mostly for drug charges,
by his last term in office.
In 2013, the United States rep-
resented about 4.4 percent of the
world’s population, but housed
around 22 percent of the world’s
prisoners, according to World
Prison Population List from Inter-
national Centre for Prison Studies.
What’s more, African Americans
and Hispanics made up 56 per-
cent of all incarcerated people in
2015, though they comprised only
32 percent of the U.S. population,
according to National Association
for the Advancement of Color
People’s website
Cory Lira, chapter member of
Critical Resistance Portland, said
she found the organization at a
time when she needed a new po-
litical home after seeing first-hand
the devastating effects of the dis-
proportionate impact that policing
and imprisonment often has on
communities of color.
Having worked on the front
lines of migrant justice work and
education, Lira said she began
“seeing the ways in which young
people are policed from such an
early age and pipelined into pris-
on.”
“Once I found CR, I was able to
see the interconnected ways that
government and institutions rely
on the prison industrial complex
to control and cage and kill us,”
she said.
The Dismantle, Change, Build
Center has become a home base
for a myriad of other organiza-
tions including the anti-police vio-
lence group Don’t Shoot Portland;
an empowerment group for young
girls of color called Brown Girls
Rise; and an outdoor program for
youth, called Urban Nature Part-
ners PDX.
The center also houses Portland
Books to Prisoners, a non-profit
that sends literature to those who
are incarcerated, and Crescent
Shine, a multi-vendor artist and
consignment shop.
Donations, which can be made
through Critical Resistance, help
to keep the non-profit communi-
ty based center afloat, organizers
said.
This month Critical Resistance
will host a postcard and holiday
party at the Dismantle, Change,
Build Center to send mail to those
that are in prisons and jails.
The event, designed to remind
those who are incarcerated that
they’re not alone and there are
those fighting for them on the out-
side, will be from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
on Monday, Dec 17.